10 Tips for Hiring Salespeople for Your Company

Today, we will discuss hiring for the sales force
but not so much the "how" of it as much as the importance of doing it
for the right reasons, at the right time and in the right manner.

We have more clients in the middle of a sales
recruiting initiative than at any time in the 25 years I've been in the
sales development business. In addition to the nearly 10,000 companies
that use Objective Management
Group's Sales Candidate Assessments, several of my personal clients
are in the midst of hiring too.

One client is hiring a new
salesperson but wants an A Player instead of the mediocre salespeople he
inherited.

Another client is hiring two salespeople - hunters -
as opposed to the product expert/account manager types they have
typically employed.

Another client is hiring as many as 15 inside
salespeople to replace the prior group that turned over as a result of
ineffective sales management, and a complete lack of selling abilities.

Yet
another client is hiring 40 salespeople - because of turnover - and we
are still waiting for the results of their sales force evaluation to
determine the underlying reasons for the turnover. We will use what we
learn to help them hire the right people going forward.

There
is another organization (not a client yet), with 50+ inside salespeople,
suffering from inconsistency and under performance, looking to improve
their ability to select the right people. We would follow the same
strategy as in the previous example to better understand what is causing
the inconsistency.

I can easily add ten more current examples
but this is plenty for my conclusions and lessons. The 10 tips that
follow are in no particular order:

This is a perfect time to be hiring - the economy
is quickly turning around - heading into an upswing - and you must have
excellent salespeople to find opportunities and get them closed by
outselling your competitors.

Hiring is not an
experiment. Trial and error will set you back the length of your sales
cycle and learning curve plus the cost of your salaries and draws.

You
absolutely must know whether you have been hiring the right people or
not, why, and what you must change to get it right. This is where the
sales force evaluation comes in. Accurate answers to all of the
possible "could it be...?" questions. It's not unusual to have 10-20 of
them that must be answered in order to be certain about what must
change.

You must know what it will take for a salesperson to be
successful in your business, calling on your market,
against your competition, and with your
pricing and product, and it goes WAY beyond industry knowledge and
experience.

Job descriptions are for employees - the people you
hire - they aren't for posting your jobs. You provide the new
salesperson with the job description when they report for their first
day of work. The job posting is a description of the person you're
seeking to hire.

Jettison or
redeploy your under performers. Everyone is a role model for your new
salespeople so you must be certain that everyone is modeling the right
kind of behaviors and competencies. It's similar to the hopes you have
for your children when you hope they meet and become friendly with good
kids from good families. The problem is that some of your salespeople
aren't and won't ever be able to model what you want and you'll need to
know whether they can be developed to do this or not. The Sales Force Evaluation
provides the insight to make these decisions too.

You must let go of old beliefs, guidelines,
methods and processes. The organization that isn't yet a client (and might not become
one) from the last example above made
a broad statement that will absolutely kill any attempts to improve
their ability to select successful salespeople. One of their leaders
said, "your hiring recommendation (hirable,
not hirable) will be a deal
stopper for us". They want the option to hire the people who don't
have a chance of being successful. This despite the fact that they
haven't had consistency from the people they've previously selected.
Why are they taking this stance? They had a problem with some other
assessment - not a sales assessment - so they believe that if the
mini-van of assessments wasn't predictive, then the Mercedes of
assessments won't be either.

You must have patience. I
know you want those new people in place in two weeks but let's be
realistic. Six months from now, would you rather be saying, "Sure glad
we waited to hire the right candidates!" or, "I wish we waited to make
the right hires - this isn't working out and we'll have to do it all
again..."

Success in sales has little correlation to college
education, degrees, years in sales, or even industry experience. Stop
putting so much weight on these criteria and instead, make sure the
candidate can outsell your competition.

Success in sales has
much less to do with who your new salespeople know than is thought to be
true. I've seen more examples of this myth than you can believe. If
your company is the one everyone wants to do business with - the
industry leader, price leader, or technology leader, then salespeople
with a book of business will thrive because the customers will follow
them to your door. On the other hand, if you are the new kid on the
block, have new (different and not yet accepted as the standard)
technology, higher pricing, are value challenged, or have decent but not
great products/services, then the books of business your new
salespeople bring along may not follow them to your door.

Do it
now, do it right, and do it objectively. Get help, use an accurate,
predictive, sales specific assessment, and make sure your process has
been optimized to attract enough of the target high quality candidates
into the pool as you'll require.

Dave Kurlan is a best-selling author, top-rated speaker and thought leader on sales development. He is the founder and CEO of Objective Management Group, Inc., the industry leader in sales assessments and sales force evaluations, and the CEO of David Kurlan & Associates, Inc., a consulting firm specializing in sales force development.
Dave has been a top rated speaker at Inc. Magazine's Conference on Growing the Company, the Sales & Marketing Management Conference and the Gazelles...